Would C.S. Lewis Have Been Canceled?
We give grace liberally to our heroes. Our fellow image-bearers deserve the same.
“Twitter isn’t real-life.”
I’m a bit amused how frequently that exact phrase appears on Twitter itself. It’s a sort of bipartisan virtue signaling, something we all say to communicate that we are not part of the unhinged “very online.” And yet so many of us are online enough, that’s hard to convincingly argue that we don’t fit that description.
Last week, I uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter apps on my phone, though I retained my accounts. I have still been on the sites some, although on a much less frequent basis, mostly just checking in a few times from my laptop. The decrease in my stress level – which I knew would be present to some degree – has honestly been shocking. One reason why is this: I’m not so fixated on the flaws of everyone I see tweeting.
My wife said recently that we weren’t meant to know every passing thought of every person we know. And yet that is in many ways what social media has become. And not only do we know those things, but we judge people to an intense degree, sometimes even with retribution (cancel culture, anyone?). Exposure to many more of a person’s worst moments and thoughts has led us to become more hamfisted with grace. The more I think about this shift in our culture, the more I think about C.S. Lewis.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of C.S. Lewis on Christian thought and imagination. Not only is he the author of the famous Chronicles of Narnia and the underappreciated Space Trilogy, but he’s also the author of a wide variety of apologetics works, including Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and imaginative Christian works such as The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters. His credits are long and known.
But Lewis’s private life as a young man, as chronicled by his biographers, does not show the maturity of character one might have expected from him. This goes deeper than Lewis’s having been an atheist. As Alister McGrath shows in C.S. Lewis: A Life, Lewis’s vices include a stint of experimenting with sado-masochism (which he once admitted while in a drunken stupor), and constantly lied to his father, including how he spent his allowance while a student at Oxford. His relationship with his father was itself especially strained. This was in part due to misguided decisions on his father’s part (including sending his sons to boarding school immediately following their mother’s death), but Lewis himself is far from blameless on this count. He later said,
"I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious."
Based on what I know of C.S. Lewis, I find it kind of doubtful that he would have embraced social media were he to have been alive at its inception. Not only was he a private person, but he ceased keeping a diary after his conversion to Christianity on the basis that it then seemed to him narcissistic. It doesn’t take much imagination to discern what he was likely to think of Twitter.
But my focus here is not on Lewis’s approach to social media would have been like, but what social media’s approach to Lewis would have been like. If Lewis was living now, and we became aware of his personal faults, would we have allowed him to continue contributing to Christian thought? Or might we have thrown him out with the trash?
My point in bringing this up is not to suggest that we have the wrong idea about accountability of Christian leaders, or those who set themselves up to be so. I just wrote last week about the fall of Jerry Falwell Jr., and how his vision of masculinity was toxic and unbiblical. And yet I worry about the simplistic “hero or villain” litmus test we apply to every situation and every person. We give tremendous amounts of grace to our heroes, and often even ignore or explain away their faults. To everyone else, however, any departure from the perfect path (or even disagreement about how exactly to walk on that path) can result in being labeled the villain. And even in the age of antiheroes, villains receive no grace in the public square.
It’s one thing when that’s our approach to public figures. But on Twitter, everyone is a public figure. That same template is now applied to your pastor, to your uncle, to your friend from high school, to someone with mutual friends that you haven’t even met.
Here is the truth, and something that I really appreciate about McGrath’s biography – it’s not that the apologist C.S. Lewis is the correct one and not the young morally flawed student. Both are Lewis. Like so many people in the real world, C.S. Lewis was complicated. Not only in that he had moral flaws, but also by the tragic loss of his mother, a strained relationship with his father, a mostly lonely childhood, and more tragedy in his later life as well. In general, we seem to understand this about Lewis. I doubt any of what I have written here, if it is news to you, seriously shakes your idea of Lewis as a great Christian thinker and writer.
Let’s be willing to consider the same possibility about other fellow image-bearers. People are complex mosaics of experiences, motivations, failures, and ideals. And name-calling in a Facebook debate or cynical subtweeting are not steps to the most grace-filled path forward.